There is a moment from June 6, 2020 that has stayed with me longer than most.
The confrontation on the Iron Bridge had wound down. The locked elbows, the following, the screaming — all of it had settled into the uneasy aftermath that follows public scenes in small towns. Katherine Hennessey was still there. In the conversation that followed she said something I have turned over in my mind many times since:
"I'm here for the kids so they know they're safe."
I said: "We are for the adults who are actually operating on this information."
What follows is a documented analysis of what "being there for the children" looked like in practice across six years of recorded, sworn, and witnessed events. All video and audio referenced in this piece exists. The transcripts are the record.
1. June 6, 2020: The Origin
The raw transcript of the June 6, 2020 video — the one Alouette Batteau posted to Facebook, which reached twenty-two thousand people and was covered by the Greenfield Recorder without an interview from me — is in the public record.
At timestamp 7:23, Katherine Hennessey states directly: "I'm here with signs like that to let the children, the brown children who live in this town... I'm here for the kids so they know they're safe."
Those children were present on the bridge during this confrontation. They were present while adults screamed profanities. They were present while a group of people followed a man who was trying to walk away, locked elbows to block his path, and refused to let him pass.
The profanities were directed at me. "Fuck you, John Sendelbach" — at volume, on a public bridge, in the presence of those children, by the adults who had brought them there. The camera was rolling. The moral credential and the recorded conduct exist on the very same tape.
2. Summer–Fall 2020: Public Narrative Formation
The institutional deployment of public shaming began almost immediately. As local resident Jim Bates documented in a July 15, 2020 letter to the Greenfield Recorder, an aggressive online petition was launched to remove my artwork.
By September, the tactical use of children had become explicit. In a September 14, 2020 feature in the Greenfield Recorder, Sonny Walters described intentionally involving her 7-year-old daughter from the beginning: > “I explained it to her at a 7-year-old level,” Walters recalled.
Walters and other organizers presented the presence of children as both moral justification and tactical centerpiece for the ongoing protests.
3. The Walters Incident: COVID and the Court Order
For years this network circulated the unverified claim that I was deliberately spraying COVID droplets. I have never tested positive.
Walters had publicly claimed a physical stay-away order barred me from her vicinity. There was no such order.
That claim originated in an evidentiary hearing where Walters and five additional witnesses presented their case for 45 minutes. The judge repeatedly pressed for specific, verifiable evidence rather than subjective feelings. They offered none. The judge issued a narrow, split-the-difference restriction as a preventative compromise while explicitly rejecting a stay-away order.
The restriction was a narrow preventative order, not a finding that I had done what they claimed. There was no stay-away directive. I was fully within my legal rights to approach the house to correct the public misinformation they were circulating.
On her own recording, at timestamp 1:18 Walters states: "I have COVID, I have a temperature and I'm very sick." Her child was present.
At timestamp 7:35 she rushes me, closing to within inches of my face while her child watches. After acknowledging it at timestamp 7:43, she pivots at timestamp 9:47 to sarcasm performed for her child's benefit:
"Do you want a Band-Aid? Are you hurt? Did I hurt you? Do you want some ice or a Band-Aid? Where did I hurt you?"
The child is watching an adult mock a man her mother has just physically rushed while symptomatic with a communicable illness.
At one point in the exchange I said, "I mean no harm to her" — a statement directed at the mother, about the child, not to the child. Walters immediately reframed it as a threat: "Do you admit that you just spoke to a minor?"
The deliberate misrepresentation — on tape, in real time, in front of a child watching an adult manufacture an accusation from a statement of benign intent — demonstrates exactly how these narratives are constructed.
4. March 1–2, 2023: The Final Crystallization
On March 1, 2023, Katherine Hennessey and I had an encounter in a gallery parking lot. The verbatim exchange from the recording:
Hennessey: "No, you came — you came in defense because I have a real problem when people —" (There is a pause. A hitch in her delivery.) "— torment children."
Sendelbach: "Who's the fucking children and who's tormenting who?"
The following day she filed a petition that produced a criminal harassment charge. That charge collapsed at the first evidentiary hearing when a clerk-magistrate found no probable cause.
Pattern
Six years. Multiple cameras. Multiple sworn proceedings. Multiple adults. One consistent dynamic.
The people who accused me of being a danger to children screamed profanities in front of those children.
They circulated unverified claims that I was spreading COVID-19 despite no diagnosis or positive test.
They physically rushed me while self-reporting fever and illness in front of their own children.
They filed sworn affidavits about my conduct toward children that collapsed upon first evidentiary review.
They performed sarcastic mockery in front of a child watching her mother acknowledge a physical rush.
Their own recordings documented conduct that mirrored the conduct they accused me of.
The children's presence at these events was not my choice. It was theirs. They chose to bring children to confrontations. They chose to perform those confrontations in front of children. They chose to use those children as rhetorical shields while the cameras documented, in unedited sequence, what they were actually doing in front of them.
I was there for the adults. The adults who are actually paying attention can now read the full record at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee.
